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“When I read in the Harvard Crimson that, ‘giving black people entrance
into schools like Harvard was the same as teaching a blind man to be a pilot’ I
just cried. My heart ached, you know, I was so excited to be in this place, and
they didn’t want me here.”

Complaints about racism from black students enrolled at
white colleges and universities are being heard from all over the United
States. - A white fraternity
hosted a Martin Luther King party at Arizona State University with partygoers
wearing saggy pants and drinking from cups made from hollowed-out watermelons.
- At San Jose State University, three white students called their black
roommate derogatory names, wrote racial epithets on whiteboards in their suite,
and forced him to wear a bicycle lock around his neck.
- A member of the student government at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln used
the N-word while opposing a resolution to restrict student representatives from
using derogatory language.

Tyrell Collier, a black senior, asked for tweets about #Being Black at the
University of Michigan using hashtag #BBUM. The flood of responses about black
experiences on Michigan’s campus included:-- "Dealing
with the irony of being the only black person in a class where the prof says
it's easier for black folks to get admitted."
-- "#BBUM is NOT raising your hand in class because you do not want to be
THAT black person who just doesn't get it"
-- "having to be a 'know it all' in order to receive full credit on
assignments because your peers second-guess all of your answers"
-- "that first class when black culture becomes the topic and you suddenly
become the voice of all black people".

Black students became so fed up with racism at Harvard that they
spoke out through a I, Too, Am Harvard photographic presentation on their Tumblr website. “Our voices often go
unheard on this campus, our experiences are devalued, our presence is
questioned,” the website says. “This project is our way of speaking back, of
claiming this campus, of standing up to say: We are here!”

The Tumblr website
is part of a larger response by Harvard’s black students and others to Affirmative Dissatisfaction. The article,
written by a white student for the campus newspaper, Harvard Crimson, said,
that: Less academically qualified applicants
should be treated as such, unless they come from poorer households and
therefore do not have access to the same amount of resources as other
applicants. However, this would be class-based affirmative action, not
race-based.
Helping those with primarily low academic qualifications into primarily
academic institutions makes as much sense as helping the visually impaired
become pilots. How would you feel if you were assured before going into surgery
that your surgeon was the beneficiary of affirmative action in medical school?
I do not see why higher academic institutions should lower their standards for
admission.

Sophomore Kimiko Matsuda-Lawrence reflected the anguish of Harvard’s
black students: “I felt, and other students felt, that our presence and
identity as black students was being de-valued… we felt like people were saying
we weren’t smart enough to be here.”

Despite it’s ‘liberal’ reputation, the disease of racism
also infects campuses of the University of California. Sy Stokes, a black UCLA
student, produced a YouTube video that was viewed by 1.7 million people. The
video produced by Stokes, the cousin of UCLA All-America and tennis star,
Arthur Ashe, dramatized racism at UCLA.. “Every black student in class feels
like Rosa Parks on the bus,” Stokes said. Racial hostility on Cal-Berkeley’s
campus is so pervasive that often talented, highly recruited black students choose
to go elsewhere.

On the other hand, there are those, who deny that racism exists
at Berkeley, at UCLA or at any other university campus. It is claimed that what
black students experience as racism, in reality, is a process of natural
selection. It’s the way the University of California identifies a potential
Clarence Thomas or a potential Condoleezza Rice or even a potential Martin
Luther King. According to this opinion, this is an approved manner of selecting
exceptional black students and preparing them for successful careers in
government and the private sector. Ward Connerly, a former regent of the
University of California was chosen this way. “Look how elite schools select their
athletes,” someone might point out. “Black athletes and others selected in this
manner have had outstanding careers. Look at President Barack Obama.”

Racism was raised in a report to UCLA Chancellor Gene Block
by Earl Hutchinson, the president of the Urban Policy Roundtable. Hutchinson
said that racist activity at UCLA was so widespread that the perpetrators didn’t
even bother to conceal it. “If the behavior of the white faculty and staff at
UCLA towards black students doesn’t change,” Hutchinson warned, “the Urban
Policy Roundtable would ask the Justice Department to initiate an investigation.”

Hutchinson’s threat of a Justice Department investigation
gave Chancellor Block and his administrators a good laugh. Even after the
murder of two black students on UCLA’s campus in 1972, the Justice Department
never investigated Chancellor Block’s predecessor. Though UCLA and the RAND Corporation
conducted research at Jonestown where the murder of a sitting United States
Congressman occurred along with the murders of a thousand black men, women and
children, the Justice Department did not conduct any investigation of UCLA. Furthermore
the Obama administration has no love for students of color. It deliberately bombed
the University of Tripoli, targeting students as well as the library with air
strikes during Obama’s overthrow of the Libyan government. Barack Obama,
himself, betrayed both the black students as well as the pre-eminent black Harvard
professor, Derek Bell, after he secured their support to become the editor of the
Harvard law journal. The president of the Urban Policy Roundtable should know that
neither Obama nor his Justice Department has any more love for UCLA’s black
students than UCLA’s white administrators.

Fifty years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of
1964, black students enrolled at
predominantly white colleges and universities still need tough skin. And why is
this surprising? Government funding in the humanities and sciences is
controlled by the demands of the NSA, Homeland Security and the State
Department. Students not recruited by the military or by the various “neo-con”
affiliates of the “military-industrial complex” are shunted outside academia’s
inner sanctums. Many black students are weeded out even before they’ve taken
their first course. But the problem is not just a racist white faculty. Black
students are deprived of a sympathetic black faculty and so find themselves in
hostile college environments, defenseless and alone.

However, according to a former member of Cal’s faculty,
Cecil Brown, black students are not the primary targets of racism in higher education.
The real targets are those qualified blacks that academia wants to exclude from
full and part time faculty positions. Brown expands on this point: “…white
faculty, especially females, do not work with others to hire more black faculty.
[They] treat any reference to [the need for additional] black faculty as an
affront.”

Cecil Brown makes an important point. Corporations and the government
share a common world vision not commonly shared by the greater society. In
order to compete for government and corporate grants, colleges and universities
must maintain a level of secrecy concerning the funded research. While white
faculty can be entrusted with the secrets of the “military-industrial” complex,
black faculty cannot. Black professor, Tyrone Hayes, a tenured professor of
integrative biology at UC-Berkeley, makes Brown’s point.

Professor Hayes was funded by Syngenta to conduct research
on the benefits of atrazine, a pesticide produced by the giant agribusiness
corporation. However, Professor Hayes’ research did not produce the findings
that Syngenta desired. On the contrary the research of Cal’s black biology professor
found that foods fertilized by atrazine could cause severe sexual abnormalities
in lab animals as well as humans. Bowing to pressure exerted by Syngenta,
UC-Berkeley tried to stifle Professor Hayes’ findings. But the black professor
refused to be muzzled as indicated by his article in the New York Times as well
as his appearance on Democracy Now.

Cal is one of the largest research institutions in the world
and receives billions in research grants annually. Black faculty, like
Professor Hayes, are a threat to academic research institutions like Cal because
corporations and the government do not want the public to know anything about their
research. For this reason. any academic institution with a significant number
of black faculty could lose millions in corporate and government research grants.
And so colleges and universities use every means possible to limit minority access
to faculty positions. One method academia uses is giving its available
affirmative action positions to white women. Thus they could meet the letter of
the Civil Rights law while maintaining white supremacy. But according to Cecil Brown,
another strategy for limiting the demand for black faculty is fostering an
atmosphere of on-campus racism. In this way, institutions like Cal can reduce
its black student population and limit any demand for black faculty.

There are 5,500 full time and 6,500 part time faculty at UC-Berkeley.
But Cal employs less than 100 full and part time African-American faculty and most
of these are employed in athletic programs. Berkeley’s African-American Studies
department has been emasculated by non-accredited courses forcing black
students to take accredited courses in the traditional “white”-dominated departments.
It is no wonder that black students feel isolated and alone. When I taught at St. Mary’s College, there
were only five black teachers out of a total of five hundred faculty. And only
one black was tenured. But while I was employed at St. Mary’s College as a part
time lecturer, a white undergraduate female student, graduated, was hired as a
tenured professor and then became a dean at the college. This is affirmative
action that white folks can support.

The persistent institutional racism experienced by black students
at white universities all over the country is no illusion; it is real. Deprived
of support from black faculty, black students are defenseless and alone. Thus,
in a real sense, black students are being pressured to relinquish their
cultural heritage and place themselves at the disposal of white advisors
committed to furthering corporate greed, mass incarceration and international
militarism. Black students, who are unwilling to support the academic
constructs of white supremacy, suffer the full impact of white racism.

Eugene Stovall
received his Ph.D. from the University of California’s Political Science
Department and has taught a several colleges including San Francisco State, USF
and St. Mary’s College. Stovall has authored five books including Cassandra’s Curse: A Black Life In A Police
State.